It's so incredibly horrifying to me that it almost becomes an abstract concept, but then you read an article like this and - guilty or innocent - the true human cost and all that associated suffering comes right back to you.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/14/boston-maratho...
Reaction to the sentencing was swift with praise for the difficult work of the jury in making a decision that many said was just.
"My mother and I think that NOW he will go away and we will be able to move on. Justice. In his own words, 'Eye for an eye.' "
Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said after the decision that Tsarnaev's crime was not motivated by religion; it was motivated by politics. She said the gravity of the crime, the murder of a child, a police officer and two young women merited the death penalty.
"Check them off," she told jurors in her closing statement. She explained there should be no doubt his crimes met the aggravating criteria because they were premeditated, cruel, depraved and especially heinous.
Sweden can't afford cancer medication for certain people, but has no issues containing violent sadists.
http://www.svd.se/effektiv-cancermedicin-anvands-inte http://www.sydsvenskan.se/skane/hon-fick-ny-cancermedicin-ut...
Some people in the middle east tortured children, women and committed other atrocities while laughing and recording it.
Whats your take on that?
Frankly, I'm so weary of the problems in this country being justified by money. We trash the environment because it would cost money to do better. We underfund schools because we don't want to pay more property tax. And we try to kill convicts because it is cheaper... or we privatize the prisons so it becomes a profit center for somebody.
Even on HN, wealthy founders are hero-worshipped, and investors are treated like kings. There is some talk about meaningful work, but a lot more talk about monetization of <insert trendy app here>.
This is not a healthy, moral society in which we currently live.
'Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves. For 200 years everybody has been saying, "Prisons are failing; all they do is produce new criminals." I would say on the other hand, "They are a success, since that is what has been asked of them." '
https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/foucault-pri...
Life in prison without parole is cheaper than the death penalty. In fact, it's 10x more expensive to put someone to death than to imprison them for life. [1]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/05/01/cons...
...at the moment.
I bet if you ran the numbers for the 1930's, for instance, when the average time from conviction to execution was 14.4 months (the range was 4.6 months to 46.1 months) [1], the death penalty would come out cheaper than life without parole.
The cost argument is a risky one for death penalty opponents, since the cost can be fixed either by getting rid of the death penalty or by making it more efficient.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=8cYom4BacjMC&lpg=PA164&ots...
Not really. Because the precursor to the cost argument is that there is a trade off between between swift and being sure. The quicker you execute, the less certain you can be of guilt.
People are constantly being set free after being on death row for years.
The only way reconcile that with any concept of justice is to put more resources into gaining higher certainty. And even if you assume 100% certainty could, somehow, be gained...you then run into the cost wall.
Fact is, being pro death penalty is being pro arbitrary execution of innocent people....and spending a lot of extra money to do it.
If the US didn't imprison so many people they'd easily be able to afford to house the actually violent criminals.
For the record, I'm very happy that people on death row get so many appeals. I'm very happy that some of those appeals are automatic (all states I'm familiar with automatically appeal any death penalty sentence to the state supreme court).
But given that the average death row inmate lives 20 years or so in custody, and that the average life sentence prisoner lives two or three times that long, and assuming that the people on death row don't get incredibly expensive food, it seems that the only reasons for a difference would be increased security costs (are life sentence inmates less likely to try to break out?) or costs not directly related to jail, such as legal appeals.
We could save a lot of money by simply denying appeals to inmates on death row, but I don't think that would be an improvement. If anything, the difference in cost between death row and life imprisonment suggests that life sentences aren't getting the same scrutiny that death sentences get, and we probably have more innocent people serving life sentences than awaiting execution.
Since the costs of appeals dwarfs all other relevant costs, it's just as true to say "under the current legal regime, appeals for death row inmate cost much more than appeals for life sentence inmates." That's a very different statement, and not necessarily something we want to fix.
If we did want to fix it, we could either spend less money on appeals for death row inmates (make it much harder to get off of death row/get exonerated), or spend more money for appeals for life sentence inmates.
Indeed, it might just be that we aren't doing everything we should to find wrongfully convicted inmates who weren't given the death penalty.
But that's certainly not the message people seem to be trying to make with the statement. The message I've always heard was "it would cost less to put him in jail for life." Or "it would cost less to get rid of the death penalty altogether." The first message has less impact when you realize that the costs involved are nearly all about legal appeals, not about running a prison, feeding the prisoners, etc. The second message is provably false: in a regime without the death penalty, the resources currently used to get people off death row would be used to get people out of life sentences.
I don't disagree with the second statement, frivolous prison sentences cause all sorts of problems, but I disagree that life sentence costs are insignificant.